Friday, October 3, 2008

When five things need to be submitted NOW...

...you end up with a slightly crazed week. Turns out when you have 4 papers and 1 job application trying to go out the door at once, you end up with a jammed door. I did get the first application in - thanks to those who gave feedback to my earlier post (Especially DrDrA, I have to admit I checked out your advice and packets links quite a bit). We did in the end decide not to mention our status even though we were told by friends that the department I was applying to was "really into" the concept. We decided that no one was probably ever thrown out of the applicant pool for NOT being part of an academic couple, but we knew people who were tossed out because they were. After a day where I tried to work on everything at once (not a good approach for mole whacking or science, it turns out), I am back to a more sane approach of prioritizing manuscripts according to deadlines. Hopefully, by the end of next week I will be able to report all 4 papers being submitted!

In the meantime, I mainly wanted to take this opportunity to highlight DonorsChoose.org for my ecology friends. The ScienceBlogs folks are running a donation challenge. DonorsChoose.org is an organization that matches up teachers who need money for learning activities in their classrooms with people like us who may have some dollars to spare (at least for a little while!). Many of the activities the ScienceBloggers have highlighted are related to their disciplines and the ecology/environmental sciences are a little underrepresented. I'm all for more microscopes and all, but when I was a child what really sang to me was the more outdoorsy/organismal activities. If you're looking to invest in either creating future ecologists or at least a populace that understands why we're just as cool as our biomedical brethren, I've highlighted a few options:

If you want to donate through the ScienceBlog challenge, the following blogs chosen some ecology/organismal options (sorry DrugMonkey...):

4 comments:

I'm glad you found my posts useful- that's why I wrote them. I've been through quite a bit as part of a double academic science career couple- and want to make the whole thing less mysterious... for people like you... :-)

Thanks for promoting the donorschoose blogger challenge RT! No need to apologize to me, the point is to donate to what strikes your fancy. faked up competition between scienceblogs is just a means to the real ends...(but we do want to beat the knitters).